Traditionally, in a computer file system, a file is the basic unit of data storage. Typically, a file in a file system has the following characteristics. It is a single sequence of bytes. It has a finite length and is stored typically in a non-volatile storage medium. It is created in a directory and has a name that it can be referred to by in file operations, possibly in combination with its path. Additionally, a file system may associate other information with a file, such as permission bits or other file attributes; timestamps for file creation, last revision, and last access etc. Specific applications can also store domain-specific properties in the byte stream of the file. For example, files that are used by a word processing application and hence considered as ‘documents’ may store properties like the Title and Author of the document. These properties are stored within the byte stream of the file in a format that is specific to the application creating the file. The properties are not structured as objects, nor do they have standardized names. The byte streams are unstructured values. Another example would be that a file that stores a music clip has a number of interesting properties such as Genre, Author, Date Recorded, Artist etc. stored in the byte stream. In addition to this meta-data, there is a byte stream that represents the music itself in some universally recognized format. The programming model in dealing with these properties is geared towards manipulating the whole byte stream. The programming model is a bind-reference model which results in a handle being manufactured for the bound instance (the result of a CreateFile/OpenFile call). The subsequent manipulation of the value is done by ReadFile/WriteFile to retrieve and update the relevant portions of the byte stream.